The "Discovery" of Malnutrition in China: A Window onto the Comparative History of Republican China, 1912–49

Malnutrition was “discovered” in China during the Republican period (1912-1949).  This was a genuine medical discovery that surprised and concerned many observers of China’s relatively new and growing industrial workforce, among whom malnutrition had become widespread by the 1930s.  It was also, however, a “discovery,” made possible by new ideas about the body and nutrition that provided Chinese with a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between eating and health.  These ideas, which originated in Europe and the United States, matured internationally during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century and spread quickly not only to China, but to many other parts of the world, including Japan, Eastern Africa, India, where malnutrition was also “discovered” during these same years.  Situating the Chinese “discovery” in this global context provides a valuable comparative framework of identifying the shared and divergent patterns in the global history of malnutrition and the processes leading to its discovery and redefinition.  Chinese observers of malnutrition located the Chinese case in a distinctive national history of food, medicine, and social change.  However, as in numerous other parts of the world, malnutrition in China was eventually defined largely as a personal medical problem, rather than a social problem, and as one that could be solved by changing worker’s eating habits, social customs, and spending patterns.  Placing this moment of Chinese history in a global comparative context further helps free the comparative history of China from the China-Japan or East Asian “colonial modernity” models that have heretofore informed and inhibited understanding of China’s historical relationship to global currents.